CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/CHRONICLE
Craft in one of the guest houses on the estate in Woodside. For the new feature for the Living section, called "A Day in the Life Of..." we follow Melanie Craft, the wife of Oracle software billionaire Larry Ellison.
What does she do all day?

Photo: CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ

CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/CHRONICLE
Craft in one of the guest...

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CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/CHRONICLE Craft works-out with personal trainer, Scott Norton, at Axis gym, in Mountain View.For the new feature for the Living section, called "A Day in the Life Of..." we follow Melanie Craft, the wife of Oracle software billionaire Larry Ellison.
What does she do all day?

Photo: CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ

CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/CHRONICLE Craft works-out with personal...

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CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/CHRONICLE Craft walking on the Woodside estate. For the new feature for the Living section, called "A Day in the Life Of..." we follow Melanie Craft, the wife of Oracle software billionaire Larry Ellison.
What does she do all day?

Photo: CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ

CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/CHRONICLE Craft walking on the Woodside...

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CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/CHRONICLE Craft gets her nails done at "Susan's Nails." For the new feature for the Living section, called "A Day in the Life Of..." we follow Melanie Craft, the wife of Oracle software billionaire Larry Ellison.
What does she do all day?

Photo: CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ

CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/CHRONICLE Craft gets her nails done at...

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CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/CHRONICLE
Craft works on her computer at "Pond House," in Woodside. For the new feature for the Living section, called "A Day in the Life Of..." we follow Melanie Craft, the wife of Oracle software billionaire Larry Ellison.
What does she do all day?

Photo: CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ

CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/CHRONICLE
Craft works on her computer at...

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CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/CHRONICLE Craft signs a new copy of her book, "Man Trouble," for a fan at a tea thrown in her honor. For the new feature for the Living section, called "A Day in the Life Of..." we follow Melanie Craft, the wife of Oracle software billionaire Larry Ellison.
What does she do all day?

Photo: CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ

CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/CHRONICLE Craft signs a new copy of her...

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF . . . Melanie Craft / Novelist finds real-life romance with a high-tech mogul

A Day in the Life (with apologies to Lennon and McCartney), a new feature that will run periodically in the Living section, follows prominent Bay Area residents through their daily routines. The first installment is about Melanie Craft, the romance novelist who recently married Oracle founder Larry Ellison..

For eight years, she was known to the public as Larry Ellison's girlfriend -- an object of curiosity, a person to be envied, and yet someone whom news photographers push aside when snapping shots of the software executive, jet fighter pilot and sailing enthusiast. But romance novelist Melanie Craft -- who married Ellison just three months ago -- is more than Mrs. Oracle. She is an individual thinker, a determined writer and a loyal partner. And like her husband -- one of Silicon Valley's most famous chief executive officers -- she's also a bit of an adventurer. How do we know? It's her first marriage but his fourth. She is 34; he is 59. He had a reputation with women; she says he's changed. If she's not a risk-taker, what else would you call someone who let a reporter and photographer tag along from breakfast until dinner to see what it's like to live the billionaire lifestyle?

8:30 a.m. We meet in Menlo Park at Axis Performance Center, where Craft has worked out three days a week for two years. It is not a meat-market gym blasting music for sweaty people pumping iron and preening in front of mirrors but a small center where clients work one on one with personal trainers.

Her guru, Scott Norton, is impossibly perky. He puts her through a series of routine moves -- a treadmill warm-up, lunges, rope-skipping -- and strange ones. There are squats with a bar and medieval-looking chains; boxing; and complicated footwork patterns through a ladder-like grid on the floor (a la "Battle of the Network Stars" from 1970s TV). Other exercises with weights, pulleys and twisting motions build her scapular stabilizers; use her sagittal, frontal and transverse planes of motion; and build her neuromuscular co- activation and proprioception, he says. I'm not exactly sure what it means, but it sounds good.

"We train people here to make sure they're better outside the gym, to meet the demands of life," Norton says, "so that Melanie will perform well in Europe with jet lag, or at the boat races." Interval training, with heavy breathing and recovery, helps so that "if she has to get in front of 30 women and communicate, her body is used to the stress of stopping and starting," Norton says.

She mentions that she used to run 6 miles a day but did not achieve the body she wanted until she started working with Norton. She has 13.4 percent body fat (Norton says the average woman has 20 to 26 percent) and eats pretty much whatever she wants. Maybe there is something to this after all. (Note to self: Must find a way to scrape up $70 per hour, three times a week, for his tutelage. As if!)

9:30 a.m. We get into her silver, two-seat Mercedes SL55 AMG. "I had a Jaguar, and then a Maserati, but Larry wanted me to have this car because of the airbags," she says. There are no vanity plates, for security reasons. We head a mile north to the couple's Japanese-style home in Atherton filled with antique Japanese helmets, folding screens and sculpture. This home is not to be confused with Ellison's six-building Japanese compound that has been under construction for 10 years in Woodside.

The front door opens as if by magic. Glen, the estate manager, greets us and takes our coats. Craft showers, puts on a black robe and goes outside, barefoot in the rain, to scatter seeds to a group of mallards that have taken up residence in the backyard pond. Thirteen ducklings hatched last spring, but raccoons claimed a few. Ellison installed a chicken-wire fence and baby monitors in the backyard and told the security guard to turn on the lights and scare off the raccoons if he heard anything. In the backyard are several koi ponds and a heated pool made to look like a rock-edged pond. The ducks like the pool; the couple has not used it since the ducks arrived. "We're a little worried about what might happen if the ducks invite all their friends and have babies," she says, watching them fly toward the seed.

10 a.m. Breakfast is served. The chef has prepared the couple's usual fare, but Ellison had an early business meeting and has already gone to work. Craft dines on miso soup, broiled salmon, rice, pickled cucumbers and sencha, a green tea, from bowls set on a black tray. When Ellison is home, they eat at a table on the patio, rain or shine (they have an umbrella and a heat lamp for bad weather.) Today it is raining, and she has guests, so she eats in the living room, in front of a black marble-faced fireplace crackling with flames. She sits on a cushion on the floor before a low table, Japanese-style. (A dining room with table and chairs indicates that not all meals are enjoyed this way.) Craft says that when she met Larry, he ate eggs, ham and potatoes every morning. But because he had worked in Japan earlier in his career and enjoyed Japanese breakfasts on business trips, the two decided to start eating them at home.

Like many couples not in the Fortune 500 list, they read the paper at breakfast and talk about the headlines. She likes the Wall Street Journal and the Economist; he's partial to the Financial Times of London. They don't read The Chronicle or the San Jose Mercury News much, she said, because they're mean to Larry. After breakfast, she usually looks at her e-mail and then heads to her office in Woodside, where she spends the afternoons writing. (Her first book, "A Hard-Hearted Man," a Silhouette romance novel, is out of print, she said. Her second, "Trust Me," centered on a veterinarian. Her third, "Man Trouble," a romantic comedy, is due out in May.) Ellison typically goes to the gym after breakfast and then to work. They meet at home for dinner around 7 p.m.

10:45 a.m. Melanie bolts up after learning what time it is. She has been talking to us about sailing on Larry's Oracle/BMW racing boat. On the open sea, the sails groan, she says, and sound as if they're going to explode. She read "Sailing for Dummies" on the way to New Zealand for the Louis Vuitton Cup qualifying races. Larry likes to talk to her about sailing, but sailing is complicated. (Note to self: Perhaps I will take him to the driving range at Stanford's golf course some Sunday afternoon to prove to him that husbands cannot teach sports to their wives. On second thought, maybe this is true only in golf?)

11:10 a.m. Susan's Nails, Menlo Park. Craft is 25 minutes late for a manicure at her favorite salon. She wants her hands to look good because she'll be signing advance copies of her new book at a lunchtime tea today. She used to wear Chanel's Nude but has shifted to deep reds because retro fashions are in vogue. She is wearing an off-white sweater, dark brown pants, a dark brown leather blazer and a pair of 1940s-style peep-toe sandals with heels. Her toenails are already red, but there's no time for red fingernails today. She gets a sheer nude that won't show smudges and is out the door in less than 30 minutes.

11:35 a.m. On the way to the tea, she talks about her first book. The manuscript was started in college and sat in a drawer, unfinished, for five years. She worked odd jobs and shopped it around for a year and a half. She says she learned the hard way that prospective authors should not pay reading fees to agents to get their attention and cooperation. "Legitimate agents only make money from selling your book," she says. She started dating Ellison about that time, and took time off from writing, explaining that her creative urge was subdued by the relationship.

"When my life gets dramatic, then I don't feel compelled to work," she says. "I don't want to go inside my head, looking for stories when there's too much happening outside. I need to have a nice, quiet life. I like to be slightly bored. I feel compelled to add the excitement myself, and I do it through writing." Her thoughts shift to her new book and the promotions she'll need to do. She's uncomfortable in crowds, and also a little shy about speaking engagements, probably because she hasn't done very many. "If it goes well, I would like to do more," she says. "I like getting out and talking about work. It's good for me and good for sales."

Noon: Twenty-three women are in the sitting room of the Ralston Mansion at Notre Dame de Namur, a private university in Belmont with an elementary school and high school on the site. They have paid to hear Craft talk about her craft. "Tea With an Author" was an auction item at the elementary school's holiday fund-raiser in December. Also up for auction was a ride in Ellison's five-seat jet.

Guests learn she graduated from Oberlin College and studied archaeology at American University in Egypt, but found that academics wasn't her calling. After college, she worked a variety of odd jobs, from bartender and pastry chef to cocktail waitress and housecleaner. She talks about what it is like to be an emerging author, how she got published, and how she writes.

The setting seems particularly appropriate for the stuff of romance novels -- the Ralston Mansion dates to 1867; the sitting room contains Oriental carpets and gilt-edged mirrors; and legend has it that some of the rooms are haunted.

Asked about the process of writing, Craft says she hates the word "formula," but there is one that publishers expect, from what kinds of swear words the hero can use to what page the first kiss occurs on. And naturally, she says, there must be a happy ending. Craft says she tries not to procrastinate, and even sticks to a schedule when traveling. She likes to write in hotel lobbies, where the hustle and bustle makes for "white noise" that is "just stimulating enough, and nobody knows you," she says.

The guests learn that she wanted to be a romance writer from the time she was a teenager devouring every Charlotte Lamb and Anne Mather novel she could find at the used-book store down the street. Her family is proud of her books, but her father, a university professor, was more impressed the day she made the front page of the Wall Street Journal (not because it was a story about her wedding, but because it was in a business newspaper, she says).

At the urging of her guests, she pulls "Man Trouble" out of her Hermes Kelly bag (she uses a larger Birkin bag when carrying her Mac G4 12-inch laptop computer) and reads a chapter. The plot revolves around a woman who is a college professor by day and romance novelist (using a nom de plume) by night. A journalist friend asks her to put on a sexy disguise and lure a bad- boy hotel developer into a relationship. The point is to get the inside scoop on the businessman's lifestyle, which is starting to affect his hotel's success.

Craft reveals that her ultimate dream is to make the New York Times best- seller list. The room is full of mothers, so the subject of children crops up. Craft, refreshingly candid, says she needs a lot of alone time, to the point that she is afraid to have children. "It's one of the biggest conflicts of my life," she says. "I don't know how I'd find the time to write." The questions are random. Someone asks why she went to Egypt in college. "It was the farthest point from Pittsburgh, Pa., (where she grew up) that I could think of as a 19-year-old," she said. "I think you find out who you are when you strip away everything that is familiar. When you do something totally crazy, you find out what's underneath the routine."

"It was wonderful, just refreshing to sit down with her," says Carol Lindorfer, one of the guests. "Being a new author, we got some insight into the creative process of writing a book, and her enthusiasm is amazing."

2:45 p.m. We are driving south on Interstate 280, a ribbon of freeway cutting through fir-lined foothills, and into Woodside -- home to the Peninsula's horsey set -- to the compound with a 45-acre Japanese garden where Craft and husband will be moving later this year. Entering the driveway, we wave to a guard at a security booth and then wind around on the road, taking a turn away from the main compound. We stop at the end of a cul-de-sac, where a two-story lodge is nestled into a hillside. Off to one side is a pond where frogs croak and phoebes flit through the air catching insects in their beaks. Trees harbor acorn woodpeckers and gardens burst with yellow daffodils and deep pink cyclamens. Leland Stanford once used the place as a hunting lodge, she says. Today it is called Pond House. Craft has made it her office and sanctuary.

French doors lead to the living room, with a kitchen on one end and her study on the other. The decor in the study is somewhat spare and done in pale tones. She calls it "modern cottage"; the effect is one of comfort. Armchairs are grouped, shelves are lined with local-history books and her desk faces a large bulletin board, onto which she has pinned various newspaper and magazine clippings, names of people she is basing characters upon, notes and research.

"I'm messing with a mystery thriller, partly historical, set in San Francisco," she says. "I don't know if I'll finish it. I'll see how it turns out." Not surprisingly, her computer is a Mac G5 with an Apple Cinema Display screen. Her husband's best friend (he was best man at their wedding) is Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs. Craft's only Microsoft product is Word for Mac. (Microsoft is run by Ellison's tech archrival Bill Gates.)

Craft did not get a chance to eat at the tea, so she has lunch here, sitting on the floor on a low-slung table in front of the fireplace in the living room. "Life with Larry is rigorous," she jokes. "You have to sit on the floor and have good posture." She usually has turkey, lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise on Alvarado Bakery sprouted grain bread, but today, she says, she is being spoiled.

One tray contains oysters on the half shell with lemon, shrimp cooked with shallots, bacon-wrapped dates and anchovies with sliced celery. Another tray contains deviled eggs flavored with a hint of curry, celery sticks and baby carrots. Unlike what happens at high-society lunches, where everyone stays away from carbohydrates (for fear of ballooning from a size 4 to a size 6), Craft digs into a piece of olive bread. The chef also brings fruit and cookies for dessert.

"I tried Atkins but I didn't like it," she said. "I lost 10 pounds, but I felt unhealthy." Her trainer says she can eat whatever she wants, as long as it's healthy, and to stop when she is full. The study also has French doors that look out onto the gardens, at the edge of which Ellison has planted a row of bamboo to hide her British garden from view at the main house, where everything is all Japanese, all the time. That is OK with Craft, who is content to have her refuge, even if it's blocked from sight.

"I let him do his thing," she says. "I really wouldn't want him messing with my books, my characters. This (compound) is his creative project. It's beautiful. It's not what I'd have built for myself, but it doesn't mean I won't love living there."

3:30 p.m. In the rain, Craft shows us the grounds under construction. There is an irregularly shaped pond -- a small lake, really -- at the center of the project, with two bridges on either side. On the western side of the pond, there is a sloping hill containing a guesthouse, a teahouse with a waterfall (whose flow volume can be controlled) and another guesthouse. On the other side of the pond is a boathouse, a guesthouse and the main house, which has its living quarters separated from an entertaining hall by a covered walkway.

A flock of wood ducks has taken up residence in the pond. A hundred or more cherry blossom trees, not yet in bloom, dot the landscape. The effect is like a resort, or a theme park of sorts, without any rides. Actually, they do have a boat with an electric motor that they take in the pond. They like to stop under the bridges, where Ellison sings. His favorites are show tunes, especially selections from "Aspects of Love" (a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber) and "Chess," (a musical by ABBA members Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, with lyrics by Tim Rice). Ellison and Craft are scheduled to meet Tim Rice in Los Angeles for brunch a few days after this interview to discuss a remake of "Chess," she says.

The interiors of the buildings are not yet finished, and dozens of craftsmen were hard at work, but on this gray, rainy day, one could imagine the sense of utter tranquility that will pervade the atmosphere when they are gone and the occupants of the house are left with only the trees, the wind and the occasional splatter of the waterfall.

"It's a little village," Craft says. "A Shangri-la."

She admires the unusual and complicated project, designed by Paul Discoe, a Zen monk and architect from Berkeley. "The people who built this house are proud, and they should be," she says. "It's art, to me."

It is not only hard to imagine her living here, it is hard to imagine anyone living here. The compound is mind-boggling. I ask her if this all seems normal. "I don't think it will ever be normal," she replies. Does her husband think it's normal? "I don't think so," she says. "He's never blase."

We walk through the living quarters of the main house, with a small kitchen (the commercial kitchen is next door in the entertaining hall), a small living room (they wanted it to be cozy) and a huge master bedroom overlooking the pond. One wall of the bathroom is clear glass that starts at the ceiling and ends halfway down to the floor, where it intersects a huge boulder that is half inside and half outside the bathroom. This is their shower nook, where they will lather up and rinse off with soap and shower head tucked into the rock's crevices and ledges. They "auditioned" several boulders for this job, each of which was brought in on its own flatbed truck. During the audition, they pretended to take a shower in front of each rock, to see which had ledges and crevices that best suited their arms' reach. (If Mohammed will not go to the mountain, the mountain will come to Mohammed?)

In the kitchen, I ask Craft what they like to cook together. "I haven't cooked anything in years," she laughs. "With Larry, you're surrounded by good cooks. I used to think I was a good cook, but I got over that fast." Ellison, however, makes "the best scrambled eggs on earth," beating them with a fork, turning the pan to high heat (not low), dropping in the butter and flash- cooking them, she says, so they are tender and never rubbery. Her specialty is chai tea, with her own freshly ground spices.

As we turn away from the compound, she stops for a quick confession tinged with a smile. "I can't believe I get to live here, but there's a level of performance to maintain," she says, referring to the austere Japanese aesthetic. "Sometimes you just want to be a slob and eat a peanut butter and jelly. That's why I have Pond House."

We walk back to her sanctuary, passing boxes that their naturalist has affixed in the trees so that the wood ducks will nest and lay eggs. We pass a barn that will house Icelandic ponies, owned by Larry's daughter from a previous marriage.

Craft wants to get some work done today, but I want to ask her a few more questions. Girl stuff, I tell her. We sit by the fire, a gas flame with real logs.

I ask how they met. She tells me that she was out with girlfriends at Bix restaurant in San Francisco. She was engaged to her first boyfriend, Todd, whom she had been dating for nine years. They had moved here together from the Midwest; he was a graduate student at UC Davis, and things weren't going well. "The people you meet when you're young are not necessarily the people you should spend your life with," she says, looking back.

Ellison was at Bix for a business dinner. He spotted her and came over to say hello. She did not know who he was or what Oracle was, and his advances were unwelcome.

"I was like, 'Whatever, dude -- I'm not on the market. I'm engaged,' " she recalls. He left the restaurant and got into his limo but evidently was undeterred. He scribbled a note and had the driver bring it in, and she read it. "At that time, I looked at him and saw a suit, and eliminated him. I was looking for an artist or a scientist," she says. "I never pictured myself with a businessman." But she did not write him off entirely. She suggested they become friends, and tried to hold him at bay. When he invited her to dinners, she came with Todd.

"There were titans of industry at these dinners, a Nobel Prize winner, and then me and Todd," she says. "I loved the opportunity to be around those people. It was incredibly stimulating and fascinating. You imagine it, when you're not in it -- it's the type of thing you would read about in Vanity Fair or other magazines." She and Todd made a mutual decision to break things off, she says. (Today they remain close; she calls him one of her "best friends on Earth.")

On their first date, Ellison took her to a muscular dystrophy benefit. Noted San Francisco matchmaker Pari Livermore was there. Craft had no idea who she was, but recalls what happened. "She said hi to Larry. She looked me up. She looked me down. She smiled, looked at Larry, and said, 'Exquisite.' I guess Larry knew then it was OK to proceed."

Initially dubious about her businessman, Craft became drawn to him because of their conversations. "He has an incredible, creative mind," she says. But her life also changed in ways she was not expecting. The jets and the limos were startling, but so was the way that people were beginning to treat her.

"When you're living a student's life, you don't have anything that anyone wants," she said. "You're not threatening to other people. Suddenly, I started seeing Larry's world, the good parts and the bad parts. When people perceive you in a certain position, they want to take you down."

The publication of her first book coincided with the beginning of the courtship. Media publications ran excerpts and mocked her, she said. "It was difficult to write again," she says. "They'd taken away my individuality. When I write a book, it's about me, not Larry. Because he's famous, it's assumed it's an inside peek at him. It took a few years to get myself together again."

She says she dealt with the scrutiny by developing a sense of humor and got desensitized to the unwelcome attention. "I'm a not-famous person in a relationship with someone who is," she says. "That's what I picked."

I ask if his reputation as a ladies' man bothers her. Craft says she thinks it's funny. "He likes women a lot," she says. "A lot of guys do. He's dated a lot of people, and it makes me feel better. He's seen what is out there, and he picked me."

She pauses for a moment. "People change," she says. "It doesn't happen quickly. I don't think in terms of today or tomorrow, I think of the big picture. It's a process. I'm learning how to be a good partner, and so is he."

Their mutual need for independence is also a plus, she says. "I need a lot of alone time. I like the fact that he can focus on his own interests."

Shifting gears from heavy stuff to lighter fare, I ask about her tastes in clothing. She likes makeup but goes for the natural look because it doesn't require a practiced hand; she is "crazy" about Valentino because the clothes are elegant and beautiful ("classic shapes with a twist") and carries Hermes bags because they don't go out of style. "It's too much mental energy to figure out if my handbag is cool or not," she says.

5:50 p.m. I tell her I'm done with my interrogation, and she heads to her study to start work. There's no clock in sight, neither of us is wearing a watch and because of the cloud cover, we can't see whether the sun is setting or not. We are both surprised to find out it is so late, and she decides to head home to meet Ellison for dinner, so we drive back to Atherton, waving at the guard on the way out. In the car, I ask where they dine out (Gaylord of India and Su Hong in Menlo Park), where they go on vacation (cruising on one of the yachts with his kids and their teenage friends during school breaks) and what they do after dinner (watch DVDs until bedtime; their recent favorites are "The World at War," "American Pie" and "American Wedding.")

6 p.m. As we pull into the driveway, I ask her what's on tap for dinner. She says she has no idea from one day to the next; she leaves it up to the chef, who knows what their favorites are. This weekend she and her husband will go to their other home in Malibu, to get away from the rain. They also have a home in Pacific Heights, but are rarely there. We turn off her car's digital radio, with its 200-channel selection, and she invites me in for tea. Much as I'd like to, I decline. I am pooped, whereas she looks as fresh as she did at 8:30. All I can think of is how perfect her posture is and how much energy she has. Her trainer should be proud.